As workplace tasks increase in complexity, teams of two or more persons rather than individuals may be needed to accomplish the tasks. Traditional single-user editors may be of limited use for such collaborative tasks. In connection with such collaborative tasks, multi-user editors may be used. Multi-user editors may allow multiple users to work on different areas of a same document. One problem with such multi-user editors relates to multiple users attempting to modify a same portion of a document. As a solution, existing multi-user editors may lock a portion of a document when accessed by one user. However, use of locking introduces several difficulties including selecting a level of locking granularity and deciding when to release locks. Use of locking can also incur additional runtime overhead adversely impacting performance. As an alternative to locking, existing systems may use a technique to process the multiple modifications which may not produce semantically meaningful results.
Some multi-user editors may provide a user accessing a document with a mini-view of where other users are currently in the document. The mini-view may be, for example, a separate window containing a minimized view of the entire document with a relative location of where each user is viewing in the document. However, the foregoing requires additional devoted screen space.